“I know that we’re about to go out for dinner, but can we pleeeease stop a shop for some cherry tomatoes? I’m making a tomato confit and it’s going to take long than I thought so I have to start it tonight!” I beseech Laura, who has just picked me up for an adventure south. Luckily, she’s used to my random needs and this isn’t a problem. On our way to Masa restaurant in Sylvania, we stop by a supermarket, fumble through a self serve check out and high tail it out of there with time to spare.

Just after Tom Ugly’s bridge in Sylvania, we arrive at a small strip of restaurants. There’s Paul’s Famous Hamburgers and Seven Lanterns but we’re looking for Masa, a Japanese restaurant that had been wholeheartedly recommended to me by Carla who is a food writer that lives locally. The Sutherland shire tends to get excited when there’s something good and new in their neck of the woods.

Except, there’s no Masa.

We look up our phones and it points us at 28 Princes Highway but another Japanese restaurant sits there called Wayama. There is a table for two with a reserved sign at the front of the restaurant so we walk in and see if they have a booking. Sure enough, our booking is there and we sit down but we have to ask what about Masa? They explain that they’ve taken over just two months ago. The chef is Noboru Takayama, the former chef at Azuma restaurant, one of the most highly regarded Japanese restaurants in Sydney. He has also worked for the consul general in Sydney for two years and trained in Tokyo for ten years.

And in case we didn’t know, a paper sign in the window tells us that he was born in the Yamagata prefecture in May 1970 and he likes swimming, fishing and cooking.

The decor is home spun and cosy and the service is fantastic. We order some drinks and regard the white board. It’s a hand written whiteboard that is brought to each table with the specials. I usually don’t go for specials because you Dear Reader won’t be able to order them as they change so frequently but these have caught our eye as being a bit different from your usual Japanese restaurant and asking the waitress, she recommends a few of them.

Calpis water and Japanese ramune 

We start with Calpis water, that unusual lemon scented, slightly thick sports drink that I’ve just made sound quite unappealing but it is actually really nice. For Laura, there’s the Japanese ramune (Japanese for lemonade) as she’s never had one before. The fun in this is of course opening the bottle. You take off the plastic wrap and the two part plastic piece, separate them from each other and using the plunger, press down on the top of the bottle. A small glass marble pushes down and this helps keep the lemonade fizzy. If you’re curious to see it in action, here’s a youtube video on how to open the bottle (because trust me, it’s not exactly apparent).

Sake steamed mussels with shallots $10

The restaurant is about half full this evening and there’s a couple with a big hot pot between them both stirring the contents and cooking them. The food comes out quickly and we happily dive in. The sake steamed mussels are tender and juicy, the balance of flavour just perfect. The soup itself is quite strong, perhaps too salty to drink by itself but good in a spoonful with a mussel. “I can’t believe this place is located here!” Laura says and it’s true, whilst the menu has teriyaki, wagyu, tempura and the usual Japanese fare, there are items like magura natto (raw tuna with fermented soybeans), simesaba (seared mackerel vinegar sashimi) and simmered salmon head that you may not see at a lot of Japanese restaurants.

Kaki Fry $10 for 4 pieces

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Every time someone mentions the words “cinnamon scroll” to me I automatically laugh and then drool. The reason for that is because years ago I visited a fast food place with my sister when she lived in Chicago. She and I were trying to order some cini minis at the drive through but suddenly when we were struck by the absurdity of the name cini mini. We pulled up to the speaker and sat there for a good two minutes laughing our guts out and trying to tell them our order, finally spluttering out those two words.

Of course once we got them, we weren’t laughing – they were delicious and warm and now anything warm and cinnamoney starts an automatic Pavlov dog response in me. So when Jas invited me to her family’s bakery in Hurstville, one famous for their cinnamon scrolls, I automatically started drooling.

Chef and now baker, Tony Jabbour

Oregano Bakery was originally a Lebanese pizza store opened in June 2010 and father Tony is a former Italian pizza chef. He is the brainchild of the cinnamon scroll that sells up to 3,000 units a day. Tony was bored and decided to expand into sweets. They already had Lebanese sweets which they bought in but wanted something unique that other stores didn’t have. So that day he took stock of what he had in the restaurant – as a savoury restaurant there wasn’t that much to choose from to make a sweet dessert. So he rolled out some pizza dough and added some cinnamon that they used in their chais. It showed promise.

The moving conveyor oven where the pizzas and scrolls are baked

Next came three months of testing – there was the added challenge that he had a very expensive and necessary conveyor oven for their pizzas which was not ideal for baking scrolls. A baker’s oven was cost and space prohibitive so instead, he had to make do with the conveyor pizza oven. Months later, they finally arrived at the cinnamon scrolls that are in so much demand. Now they make 3,000 scrolls a week not including the blossoming wholesale trade and 80% of sales are for the cinnamon scroll. Tony has even contemplated closing down the non sweet side of the business just to concentrate on the scrolls and sweet baked goods.

Even the cinnamon paste recipe is a secret from everyone but Tony. Not even his wife or daughter knows the recipe although he tells us that he has written it down “somewhere” they can find it. They make so many that they have a chef come in from midnight to 6am every single day to roll out the dough. They now come in myriad flavours like honey and walnut (the second most popular after cinnamon), sweet tahini, orange and macadamia and chocolate.

Sonia Jabbour 
The cinnamon scrolls come in two sizes: small at $2.50 or large at $3.90 or a box of six for $12. “We’ve already sold 60 boxes of the half dozen this morning already” says Jas’s mother Sonia who is the force behind the counter. “I have to believe in what I’m selling” she says and we watch as she gives samples to people while telling us that she routinely talks customers out of buying items like the apple scrolls because they’re “boring” and talks them into the cinnamon scrolls.

Meat pizza $6.50

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“There are eight of us, that’s definitely a good sign!”

Now ordinarily I’m not a particularly superstitious person. It mainly extends to jinxes more than anything else. And whilst Chinese people are renowned for being superstitious, I’d say that my parents were mildly superstitious but not overtly so. The number 8 is said to be extremely lucky (and I was born on the eighth of the month so I figure that has given me plenty of luck) and conversely the number 4 is said to be bad luck. But growing up, practically overrode superstition and when they bought their first house we ended up growing up in a house numbered 44. If you know Chinese people you would know that many would either ask to change the number or they would quite likely not live at a house who has an extremely unlucky number (with 44 being double bad luck!).

So when we had our crowd of eight dumpling eaters I couldn’t help but remark about the superstitious number. Allow me to explain our exploits for the day. Our aim was simple, to find the best Xiao Long Bao soup dumplings in Sydney. You know those deliciously warming dumplings that seem to have taken over the hearts and tummies of food lovers? At best they have a delicate, silky skin encasing a pork filling with a hot, fragrant soup inside which burst open to warm the tummies (and possibly scald the tongue!). We’d see if dumpling fatigue was indeed a real phenomenon and we would test our stomach’s fortitude in the most delicious way.

Starting at 1:30pm in the afternoon (later than we’d like but David had a swim that morning) our group was made up of intrepid dumpling lovers Queen Viv, Miss America, David the chef from Perama and his wife Belinda, Jen from Truffled Pink and her boyfriend Nick came along with Mr NQN and I. Only hardened dumpling lovers needed apply. Our list encompassed nine dumpling restaurants in total spread across Sydney. Everyone perused the list of dumpling houses that we were eating at and nodded. “Also there are a lot of eights in the phone numbers!” someone exclaimed.

The dumpling-mobile aka Black Cherry

This was a mission that was planned far ahead of time. In fact it was planned almost three months in advance and in that space of time our naughty car Elphaba had decided to protest and die and we found ourselves carless. Thankfully the kind people at Toyota loaned me their new Rukus car (in a colour we christened “Black Cherry”) to help us in our mission. Thank god for friends with cars!

The brief:

• Try steamed xiao long bao and the pan fried pork buns if they had them on the menu
• We could order any drinks that we needed (dumpling chasing is thirsty work!)
• Try not to loiter if the place is busy
• We would score the dumplings on four criteria: the pastry, appearance, filling/flavour and soup. They would be scored out of 10 with adjustments allowed

Din Tai Fung, World Square, Sydney CBD

Our first stop was aiming high. We had all at other times visited Din Tai Fung and knew that their Xiao Long Baos were fantastic and whilst there was some debate about the flavour of the dumplings with Mr NQN insisting that Shanghai Night‘s were better for flavour, there was no mistaking how pretty these specimens were. Said to have at least 18 pleats in each individual dumpling these were mini works of art. As we walk towards Din Tai Fung we see a huge sign saying that they are not affiliated with any other dumpling restaurant which is oddly large for such an announcement.

Mr NQN, Queen Viv, Miss America and I meet the rest of our dining pals in front of this sign. “We’ve been kicked out!” Belinda tells us as they had been sitting there waiting for us but when they asked for a table for eight, they were asked to wait outside for a table. Yes it’s that sort of place. There is always a queue outside Din Tai Fung, pretty much at any time of the day.

“We’ve got to take turns explaining to them why we only want Xiao Long Bao” we agree and I go first. I fill in the form on the table ticking the boxes for two lots of Xiao Long Bao (we’re hungry as it is past our lunch hour) including several orders for the terribly refreshing lychee and mint drink and beers and two lots of xiao long bao.

The waiter hesitates “Just two?” “Yes just two, we’re on a diet” I offer. To their credit there’s no gnashing of the teeth (the large drinks order probably bought us an extra 30 minutes at the table) and they bring us a little stand for our handbags which comes with a cover cloth.

Xiao Long Bao

Our dumplings arrive quickly as they tend to here and they are very pretty specimens indeed. On the table are small bowls with threads of ginger on them and you add the vinegar and soy to these strands of ginger and dip the dumpling into this. There is even a guide telling people how to eat a Xiao Long Bao so we carefully followed the instructions and deliver a soup, gingery specimen to our lips. The dumpling skin is wonderfully silky and smooth and thin and the filling is less dense and less tightly packed than other dumpling restaurants. The soup with its helpful injection of ginger in the sauce is also just the right amount. Popular with the group, we pass around the scorecard and mark them.

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